


Comfort Me with Apples

by emungere



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: F/F, Were-Creatures, Werecats
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-14
Updated: 2016-09-14
Packaged: 2018-08-15 02:06:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8037976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emungere/pseuds/emungere
Summary: Chiyoh comes to visit Reba and doesn't quite get around to leaving again.





	Comfort Me with Apples

**Author's Note:**

> This story came out of a conversation with coloredink that went something like Moomin in the jungle > tigers in the mist > tigers in the mist at Lecter Castle > Chiyoh making friends with the tigers... 
> 
> And that's why Chiyoh is a weretiger.

Reba woke up in her hospital room and did not move. She knew the call button was just to the right of her hand. Its edge touched her pinky finger. She had set it there before she went to sleep. 

“I know you're here,” she said. “I knew you were here last night too.” 

“You said nothing,” a voice observed. 

It was not D. Reba’s breath shook out of her. She had forced herself to keep her hands relaxed and now she let them clench on the edge of the sheet. “I thought I might be wrong. You move quietly.” 

“I did not wish to disturb you."

The voice was a woman’s. She had an accent. Asian, Reba thought, but she wasn’t sure, not with just those few words. “What are you doing here?” 

Reba didn’t hear her move. She heard nothing at all, not a rustle of clothing or the woman’s breath or even a hint of footsteps. But, when she spoke again, her voice was closer. 

“I came to ask you a question,” the woman said. 

“Are you a reporter?”

“No.”

“Who are you?” 

“My name is Chiyoh.”

Reba could feel Chiyoh’s attention on her. That, she thought, was what had woken her. That focus. “All right, Chiyoh. What do you want to ask me?” 

Another silence. “What will you do now that it is over?” Chiyoh asked. 

“Most people ask how it felt. If I was afraid.”

“Did Will Graham ask if you were afraid?” 

“Do you know Will Graham?” Reba asked. 

Silence.

“No,” Reba said. “He didn’t ask how I felt. About any of it.” She paused and smoothed the sheets. Her mouth was dry. She reached for the plastic pitcher on the bedside table. “Would you like some water, Chiyoh?”

The silence this time had a different quality. Chiyoh was gone. 

\\*

Reba went back to work the day after she was released from the hospital. Her boss had told her that she could take time off, but she didn’t know what she would do with time off. Think too much, probably. 

She already thought too much. She thought about the fire and the smoke. The heat had singed her hair. She had smelled her clothes starting to burn. She remembered the feel of the hall rug under her palms and the warped boards beneath it digging into her knees. 

She remembered stroking the tiger, its teeth, the wet heat of its breath. She remembered D’s hands cupping her breasts and the way he had lifted her so easily and with such care. She remembered his voice when he said to keep still or he couldn’t keep the dragon off her. 

She spent the bus ride home from work reconsidering her decision. Maybe staying home for a few days wouldn’t be a bad idea. She leaned her cheek against the cold glass, and the rattle of the bus’s suspension vibrated through her bones. 

She was coming up the walk, palming her key, when she heard footsteps behind her. 

“Will you invite me in for tea?” Chiyoh said. 

“I offered you water and you ran out on me.” 

“Water is hospitality in the desert. Tea is hospitality in the snow.” 

“And it’s supposed to snow,” Reba said. “So I guess you’d better come inside.” She unlocked the door. 

“Do I frighten you?” Chiyoh said. 

“I don’t scare easily.”

“If you did, you would not be here. But that is not what I asked.” 

Reba stepped inside and gestured for Chiyoh to follow. “Come on. You’re letting the penguins in.” 

A pause. “The penguins.”

“That’s what my mother used to say. If we left the door open, we were letting them in. If we left the fridge open, we were letting them out. You’ve got to keep those penguins where they belong.” 

Chiyoh stepped inside, and Reba shut the door behind her.

“I am afraid of the situation,” Reba said. “A mystery woman who knows too much about my business and likes to watch me sleep. But I’m also curious. You don’t seem like a reporter, and so far you don’t seem like a crazy.”

“Did he?” 

Reba stopped halfway to the kitchen. She rested her fingertips against the wall. “No. He didn’t.”

The couch creaked gently as Chiyoh lowered herself onto it. “I have been told that monsters are more difficult to bear when they wear human skin.”

“I don’t know if they’re harder to bear. They’re harder to set your heart against.” Reba put the kettle on to boil and took down her teapot from a high shelf. She seldom used it, but she had made tea in it once for D. Chiyoh was silent until Reba set the tray down on the coffee table. 

“I have killed for food and I have killed to defend myself,” Chiyoh said. Her voice was soft and even, without inflection. “Never for sport.”

“I’m relieved to hear it,” Reba said. She poured. The pale scent of green tea rose up from their cups. “You asked me what I’ll do now. I went back to work today. Tomorrow I’m meeting a friend for lunch. I’d like to learn how to play the harp.” 

Only the faintest clink of cup on saucer announced that Chiyoh had picked up her teacup. “I would like to hear you play,” she said. 

“I doubt you would, at least to start with.” 

“In this, you must trust me. I have come to prefer effort to polish.”

\\*

Chiyoh kept appearing on Reba’s doorstep when she arrived home from work, never in any pattern that Reba could work out and never when she had company. Reba bought a small Celtic harp and began taking lessons. It was the first time she had tried to play any instrument since fooling around with a boyfriend’s guitar in high school. It went slowly. 

Chiyoh genuinely didn’t seem to mind. She sat and listened, often on the floor in front of the gas fire. Sometimes she made tea or cooked dinner for them. After a few weeks, Reba put the harp in Chiyoh’s lap and her fingers on the strings. 

“I will not do well at this,” Chiyoh said stiffly. 

“Will you do worse than me?”

“It is possible.” 

“Never know till you try,” Reba said. She walked Chiyoh through a tune, note by note, but she could feel the tension in her hands. She touched Chiyoh’s forearm and then, hesitantly, raised a hand toward her face. “May I?”

“You may,” Chiyoh said. There was no trace of tension in her voice. 

Reba skimmed her fingers over Chiyoh’s cheeks and lips and her closed eyelids. “Does it make you so unhappy? The music?”

“Not when you play it. I have lived for many years in silence.”

“But you don’t want to do it yourself?” 

Chiyoh shook her head, Reba’s fingers still on her lips. “I do not yet know what I want to do.” 

“What did you do before?”

“I waited,” Chiyoh said. “I hunted. Pheasant and duck. Sometimes a deer. I brought flowers to the dead.” She paused. “There was a certain tree, taller than the others. Once, I climbed to the top. It seemed as though I could touch the moon. As long as I did not try, the illusion remained.” 

Reba wet her lips. “D took me to the zoo. They had a tiger unconscious to work on its teeth. It felt like touching the sun.” 

Chiyoh took Reba’s hand in hers and held it tightly. She was so quiet that, without her touch, Reba wouldn’t have known she was there at all. 

\\*

Reba sat at the bus stop after work. Someone approached and stood under the shelter with her. “I’ve got a gun,” the man said. He sounded nervous. The barrel of his pistol pushed into her side. “Give me your wallet. Don’t talk.” 

Reba was pulling her wallet out of her bag when she heard the growl. It froze her in place and sent goosebumps down her arms. She though of D, roaring, but this sound was not something that could have come from a human throat. She thought of tigers. 

The mugger gave a little choked off scream. “God, oh God, oh shit!” he said. She heard his footsteps pounding away. 

Something large and warm moved toward her and paused. Reba heard nothing, not even its breath. Soft fur brushed against her hand. The creature passed by her and was gone. 

\\*

That night, Reba woke with someone else in her bedroom. “I did not know whether to come,” Chiyoh said. 

Reba sat up in bed. “Something happened to me today.” 

“Yes. I know.”

Reba rubbed her hands together. She pressed her thumb hard against her knuckle bones. “D made sense after I understood that he was crazy. Nothing about this makes any sense unless I’m crazy.” 

“You are not crazy,” Chiyoh said. She sat on the edge of the bed. After a moment, she took Reba’s hand. “May I lie down with you?”

Reba moved over to make room. Chiyoh stretched out at her side. Slowly, slowly, Reba felt the bed dip lower beside her. Chiyoh’s body seemed both heavier and warmer than was possible. When Reba reached out to her, she touched fur and a massive muscled flank. “I am definitely crazy,” she said. 

The tiger put one heavy paw on her hip and brought its face close to hers. It bumped the bottom of her chin with its head like an enormous cat. Reba touched its ears and then its teeth. “Was it you before too?” she whispered. “At the zoo?” 

The tiger, Chiyoh, made a negative sort of rumble. Its tail tickled Reba’s nose until she laughed and pushed it away. She stroked the tiger’s face and side and let its tail slide through her hands. Eventually, still certain she was crazy, she slept. 

\\*

In the morning, she reached out to touch the warm shape beside her. It was human and naked. She pulled back quickly. “I’m sorry,” she said. 

“You were not sorry last night,” Chiyoh said. 

“It’s not the same. I should’ve asked.” She swallowed. “I should’ve asked last night too, shouldn’t I?” 

“Perhaps. But you would have known if I had objected. And you would know now.”

Reba turned onto her side and brushed her palm down Chiyoh’s arm to her hip. “I don’t understand. I — you’re really—“ 

“I have two shapes. Both are me, one no more than the other.”

“When D said he was a dragon—“

“No,” Chiyoh said gently. “Only in his mind. His was an entirely human madness.”

Reba put her hands over her face. Chiyoh stroked her hair, slowly, for a long time. 

\\*

They sat in front of the fire. It was snowing outside again, a late snow, maybe the last of the year. Reba had done her practice and set aside the harp. “Why did you come to me?” she asked. “Why do you stay?” 

“I looked in on all of the participants in this play.”

“Me. Will Graham.” 

“Jack Crawford. Will’s wife, Molly.” She paused. “Hannibal Lecter.” 

“It’s him, isn’t it? He’s your D.” 

“Not in the sense you mean. I knew him as a child.” She took Reba’s hand between her own, fingertips drawing softly down her palm. “I believed I saw the instinct of a predator in him, but I was wrong. He ate his kills, but he did not kill for food.” 

“Were you going to make him … like you?” 

“We are born this way, not made. But there was a time when I felt kinship with him.”

“I’m sorry,” Reba said. “But I’m glad you came here.” 

“You asked me why I stayed. It is because you know how to move forward, and I feel I have been standing in the past for many years. Or sitting in the top of a tree, failing to touch the moon.” 

Reba reached for her, and Chiyoh pressed her cheek against Reba’s seeking palm. Reba kissed her, soft and slow. Chiyoh’s breath hitched, and her grip on Reba’s other hand tightened. After a moment of stillness, she flowed forward, and Reba’s arms were full of her. She tasted of the jasmine tea they’d been drinking, and her hair smelled faintly of sage from using Reba’s shampoo. 

\\*

Reba stayed home from work the next day. The snow was piled deep outside the door, the buses were on reduced routes, and she wanted to stay where it was warm. She and Chiyoh made vegetable soup together. 

Reba paused in chopping carrots to ask: “You can change any time you want to?”

“Yes.” 

“Do you mind it? Does it hurt you?”

“No.” 

Later, after lunch, they sat in front of the fire. Reba had a cup of cocoa. Chiyoh lay down behind her, around her. Reba felt the change, felt her increased size and presence. She reached back. The tiger’s fur was thick and soft. Chiyoh licked the back of her hand with a tongue like sandpaper. Reba leaned into her side and was entirely surrounded by warmth.


End file.
